The node's runtime is the Go binary: one static executable the host runs as ./node-tools from its own
bundle. Node.js stays on the machine for the TypeScript bundles the runtime launches. The TypeScript
source stays in the repository: it is the runtime image the per-module containers run until WP4c.
The toolchain image installs from this package.json with a range; unchanged, Docker reused the
cached install and the image kept SDK 0.1.3 after 0.1.5 was published. Bundles copied that copy, so
a launched bundle registering its seat first served the seat's verbs as its own tools. Requiring
0.1.5 says what the runtime and its bundles need, and invalidates the cached layer.
The runtime knows no language, so nothing ties it to Node.js. This ports its serve mode — the
pinned bus connection and patient connect, following memberships, launching every served bundle
over MCP on stdio with its own environment, a child's emit published as its module, each tool,
the tools verb and seat verbs served where the mesh issued them, and the console on loopback —
to one static binary. Same subjects, request and reply bodies, event headers and MCP answers.
The TypeScript stays: it is still the runtime inside the per-module containers until WP4c.
Tests run against a real bus and share the TypeScript fixtures.
Every served entrypoint is started as a process speaking MCP over stdio, told its module and node;
one that is not executable is refused by name. The import path, the SDK resolve hook (issue 209)
and the per-registration hand-off go. The one-module form the per-module containers use is still
imported until they move (to-be 38 WP4c). A child's mesh/publish is published as its module and
answered once accepted; a child that dies says why in its own last words. Fixtures are served
through launchers exactly as the builder writes them.
node-tools sets MESH_SERVED_MODULE for each child it launches, so the SDK's stdio loop lists that
module's tools by their names and a seat's verbs as the seat's, whichever was registered first.
The mesh composes every served module's words into MESH_TOOL_ENV; the runtime takes it at start
and removes it from its own environment, then gives each registration's contributor and each
launched child the runtime's words plus its own module's, never another's. Against an SDK
without collectToolsEach it says so and serves with the runtime's words only. The test serves
two imported bundles and one launched, each answering with its own words and none of the others'.
A bundle carries its dependencies, the SDK among them; imported in-process that copy was a
second SDK with its own tool registry, so a bundle registered its tools into a list the
runtime never read and served nothing, silently. A resolve hook (module.registerHooks, in
thread; module.register is deprecated from Node 26) now sends every import of
@novox/mesh-sdk, from whichever bundle, to the runtime's own copy: one registry, one broker.
The test loads a bundle from a directory holding its own SDK copy and sees its tool served.
One repository, two modules (ADR 0069). `node-tools/` holds the runtime — its code, tests, package
and the manifest of the module the controller composes a process for on every machine it is
assigned to: a bundle of `src/main.js`, the interpreter as a package, a place for the node's
credential, the loopback port the console declared, and leave to call every tool. Nothing about
how it runs: which bundles to load, where the credential is and whose machine it is are the
controller's to compose (WP2). The root module `mesh-tools` keeps the two images TypeScript
bundles are compiled in and a module's own service may run in; it is no longer how tools reach a
node.
As node-tools, `serve` is also the console (ADR 0175 §6): the same process answers MCP on
loopback for whoever is on the machine, through which the tools it serves can be called. A
module's own runtime in a container keeps serving without a listener.
The toolchain image now carries /app/runtime — a package.json saying the compiled files are ES
modules and the production node_modules — for the builder to copy into every TypeScript bundle,
so a bundle unpacked on a machine starts (ADR 0188 §5; the builder's side is the controller's).
Proven here by compiling node-tools with the toolchain's exact flags and starting the result.
The AMQP probe script is gone with the bus it probed.
jochen
mesh-admin